The End of Your World

I picked up The End of Your World because my meditation teacher suggested that it provided a clear description of what he sees as the most common path to awakening.   It contains a lightly edited collection of talks that Adyashanti gave back in 2007, together with a long and illuminating interview with the founder of Sounds True publishing.  His central idea is that most folks do not experience complete awakening in one single earth shattering moment.  Instead, he observes that most people at first just get a glimpse of awakening where they see the fabricated nature of the self.  That is, they have a non-abiding awakening.  With time and practice, they can then begin to revisit this awake experience, gradually seeing through deeper and more tenacious manifestations of self until they experience a second, and this time abiding, awakening.  Adyashanti says that in his own case the time between non-abiding awakening and abiding awakening was about 6 years, so this transition period can be substantial.  The book is specifically written to help people negotiate this intermediate period by outlining its overall trajectory and identifying some of its common pitfalls.

As far as I can tell, Adyashanti's non-abiding/abiding distinction mostly corresponds to the first path/second path distinction in Theravadan buddhism.  But I'm not super clear on how all these various maps compare and contrast.  Nor am I particularly interested in maps anymore.  For myself at least, I've concluded that the maps are more a hindrance than a help.  They exacerbate my own natural tendency to practice with a gaining idea, my frequent inclination (confirmed ¡scientifically! by my Investigator/Observer enneagram) towards a sort of spiritual avarice.  

So then, why did I enjoy reading a book that in some sense provides a map of the progress towards awakening?  There are two things that make Adyashanti's "map" distinctive and hence more useful to me than other accounts of meditative progress.  

First, the idea is in a way so obvious that it constitutes a kind of anti-map.  Translated into everyday terms, he's basically saying that while you may grasp the importance of some particular idea or experience in seconds, it can take years to unpack all its implications.  Or, equivalently, that once you have some idea of where you're headed, you then need to correctly practice a skill until it becomes automatic.  Ultimately, these are just generic descriptions of the learning process that apply to any case where we are trying to learn how rather than trying to learn that, trying to cultivate a skill rather than assimilate information.  The only reason that a description like this can appear as a map of sorts is because we so often implicitly assume that learning ideas should be instantaneous.  Adyashanti clearly wants to disabuse us of the notion that awakening is some ideal endpoint we can someday "get".  It's not a state of eternal bliss we are seeking so much as a whole way of approaching our experience, even, perhaps especially, when it's anything but blissful.  Throughout the book, he repeatedly points out that even abiding awakening has nothing to do with feeling good and it does not come with any permanent guarantees of a blissful peace.  Awakening is just the willingness to look at what's happening right now, and now, and now, over and over again, moment by moment.  In other words, Adyashanti's "map" is animated by the same paradox that defines all of Mahayana buddhism -- we are already awake, we just need to realize this.  Our "progress" lies simply in more often realizing where we already are.  It's a strange sort of map that only ever describes your current location, that never asks you to go anywhere, but only to consider why you feel like you're anywhere other than right where you are.

Second, the way Adyashanti describes traversing this map makes all the difference.  Instead of characterizing our progress by what we attain, he characterizes its entirely by what we lose.  And as the title of the book indicates, we have to be willing to lose everything in order to fully awaken.  The process is one of increasingly deep surrender of our sense of control.  Instead of discussing specific steps we need to succeed at reaching, Adyashanti always comes back to the fundamental values of honesty and sincerity in the face of our failures.  The basic question he advises us to keep asking is, "If you know what awakening feels like, what's keeping you from being there right now"?  This isn't a rhetorical question but a tool for constant inquiry into the conditions that cause our self to arise.  It's only when we understand these conditions, and fully accept our helplessness in the face of these conditions, that, as he puts it, Spirit begins to awaken from our ego, rather than our ego attempting to possess awakening.